Momosuke Fukuzawa

2016/04/01

Fukuzawa Yukichi and his father Hyakusuke had direct contact for only a year and a half. Since Yukichi was just an infant at the time, he had no memory of his father. Nevertheless, Hyakusuke must be counted as one of the people who had the greatest influence on Yukichi throughout his life.

In "The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi," Yukichi introduces Hyakusuke by saying, "My father was a scholar. An ordinary Sinologist." A letter sent to Yukichi in later years by Nakamura Ritsuen, a Confucian scholar of the Minakuchi Domain (now Shiga Prefecture), records that Hyakusuke studied under Nomoto Setsugan, a scholar of the Nakatsu Domain, and later became a disciple of the renowned Confucian scholar Hoashi Banri of the Hiji Domain (now Oita Prefecture). It also notes that Hyakusuke was a senior fellow student to Ritsuen.

Hyakusuke formed a deep friendship with Ritsuen through their studies and looked after Ritsuen, who was 14 years his junior, as if he were his own younger brother. It is said that Hyakusuke's recommendation helped Ritsuen, the son of a dyer in Nakatsu, become a scholar for the Minakuchi Domain. However, Hyakusuke himself remained a low-ranking samurai of the Nakatsu Domain. He was ordered by the domain to serve in Osaka, where he worked as a "kaimaikata" (official in charge of rice shipments) at the domain's warehouse residence.

The role of a kaimaikata involved negotiating loans with the wealthy merchants of Osaka. Because there were many temptations involving money, it was common to rotate officials after short terms. However, Hyakusuke was highly regarded for his honest and sincere character and was repeatedly reappointed. Among scholars of that era, there was a trend of viewing the handling of money as beneath them, so this work was by no means satisfying for Hyakusuke. Every time his term approached its end, he submitted a written request to be replaced, stating that "continued service is difficult," but he was never able to live in his hometown of Nakatsu again, spending 14 years in Osaka until his life came to an end.

The Fukuzawa family's stipend was 13 koku and a ration for two people, which must have made for a tight household budget for a family raising five children. However, Hyakusuke, who loved reading, was an enthusiastic book buyer, and his collection eventually reached 1,500 volumes. Among them were expensive books that were not easily obtained. One such work was a 64-volume set of Chinese writings titled "Jōyu Jōrei" (Imperial Edicts and Regulations).

Hyakusuke was overjoyed when he finally managed to acquire "Jōyu Jōrei," which he had wanted for a long time. On that very day, December 12 of the 5th year of Tenpo (January 10, 1835, in the Western calendar), his fifth child was born, and he named him Yukichi, taking one character from the title of the book. Hyakusuke's love for reading was such that he would even save on rice and salt to buy books, which may have been a source of trouble for his wife, Jun. However, this massive collection of books would later help the Fukuzawa family and Yukichi. In 1856, when Yukichi was set to depart from Nakatsu for Osaka once again, the Fukuzawa family had many debts that needed to be settled. At that time, they were able to pay off the debts by having the Usuki Domain in Bungo Province purchase Hyakusuke's entire collection of books.

In July 1836, only a year and a half after Yukichi was born, Hyakusuke died suddenly. Jun and the five children left behind could not continue living in Osaka and had to return to Nakatsu. Upon hearing of Hyakusuke's death, Nakamura Ritsuen rushed from Minakuchi and saw the family off at Ajikawaguchi as they headed back to Nakatsu, holding the infant Yukichi in his arms.

After returning to Nakatsu, Jun raised the five children, including Yukichi, on her own. Jun maintained the family traditions that Hyakusuke had cherished. As Yukichi noted in "The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi," "From morning till night, I did nothing but listen to my mother's stories; it was as if my father were still alive even though he was dead." She took every opportunity to tell the children about Hyakusuke.

Yukichi continued, writing about their home life in Nakatsu: "There was no strict father, but the mother and children lived harmoniously. Not only did the siblings never have a single fight, but we were raised to believe that we could not engage in even the slightest vulgar or base behavior. There was no one in particular to teach us, and my mother was by no means a loud or difficult person, yet it happened naturally. This was surely due to my father's legacy and my mother's influence."

What, then, was the family legacy left by Hyakusuke? A glimpse of it can be seen in an anecdote about Hyakusuke that Jun told Yukichi and his siblings.

During his time in Osaka, Hyakusuke had a hobby of collecting old coins. A one-mon coin had a hole in the center, like a modern 5-yen coin, and for transactions involving large amounts, people used a "zenisashi," which was a string of these coins tied together. A string of 100 mon was actually treated as 100 mon even if it only had 96 coins, and there was a custom of not counting them individually during a transaction. One day, Hyakusuke found several rare coins in a bundle, took them out to set them aside, and then went out. While he was away, a family member who was unaware of this gave that string of coins to a traveling fishmonger as payment. When Hyakusuke returned and learned of this, he did not give up, thinking it was just a small amount of money or that it would be too difficult to find the peddler now. Instead, he asked what the fishmonger looked like and searched the town for two or three days until he finally found him. It is said that Hyakusuke apologized to the fishmonger for his own carelessness and paid back the missing amount.

Yukichi shared this story, which conveys Hyakusuke's conscientious, honest, and kind character, with his own children. To admonish them to live in a way that would not bring shame to their grandfather, he wrote a document titled "Record of the Distribution of the Fukuzawa Family's Old Coins" and distributed the old coins from Hyakusuke's collection among his children.

It was only about ten days before he wrote the note that Yukichi received the letter mentioned at the beginning from Hyakosuke's close friend, Rien Nakamura. In it, he wrote that while he heard Yukichi disliked Confucianism and Confucian scholars, if Yukichi did not value the path of kotei (one of the Confucian virtues, meaning filial piety toward parents and obedience to elders), it would go against his father's wishes. Yukichi replied to Rien that he had heard detailed accounts of his father's words and deeds from his mother and had engraved them deeply in his heart, never to forget them. One can imagine that Rien's letter reminded Yukichi of his father's teachings and led him to take action to pass them on to his children.

Hyakosuke often told Jun that once Yukichi turned 10 or 11, he would send him to a temple to become a monk. Jun would mention to Yukichi in passing that if Hyakosuke were still alive, he would have become a priest at a temple. The era in which Hyakosuke lived was one where a person's status and position in life were determined by the family they were born into under a strict class system—samurai children became samurai, farmers' children became farmers, and merchants' children became merchants. This was the social structure known as the monbatsu (family lineage) system.

Even among samurai, there were differences in rank. Although the Fukuzawa family into which Hyakosuke was born was of samurai lineage, they were lower-ranking samurai, and no matter how hard he worked, he could not hope for promotion. Thinking of the regret of Hyakosuke, who left his hometown for unwanted work and ended his life without his achievements being rewarded, and the depth of his love in deciding to at least make Yukichi a monk—a path where one could make a name for oneself through their own strength, away from the monbatsu system—it is said that Yukichi would sometimes weep alone. He came to hate the class system that had caused Hyakosuke such suffering, leading him to utter the famous words, "The feudal system is my father's mortal enemy."

Behind Yukichi's thorough fight against the monbatsu system was a determination to remove old systems that hindered individual independence and, by extension, the independence of the nation. While a private grudge like "my father's enemy" was likely not the only thing sustaining him, it is certain that if he had spent his childhood in a comfortable position without questioning the monbatsu system, his philosophy would have been different.

Nobukichi, the father of former President Shinzo Koizumi, was one of the disciples Yukichi loved, but his life ended at the young age of 45. Yukichi immediately sent a message of condolence, in which he described Nobukichi as follows:

"Resolute in spirit and free from greed, upright in conduct and broad-minded, gentle in word and deed, naturally commanding the respect and awe of others." The Koizumi family began hanging this eulogy in their alcove (tokonoma) every year on the anniversary of Nobukichi's death. For Shinzo, who was only six when he lost his father, this eulogy may have served as a clue in tracing his father's image.

Concerned for the wife and four young children left behind by the Koizumi family, Yukichi had them live in a building within the Fukuzawa estate on the Mita Hilltop Square for a while. Thus, Shinzo had the opportunity to observe the Meiji giant, Yukichi Fukuzawa, up close through the eyes of a young boy. Later, in his final years, Shinzo wrote "Fukuzawa Yukichi."

In that book, after looking back at Yukichi's life from birth to death, Shinzo included a chapter titled "The Image of the Father." There, he pointed out that Yukichi's character as a practitioner of strict and upright morality, and as a dutiful, honest, and kind person, was greatly influenced by his father, Hyakosuke. Shinzo wrote that he surmised Hyakosuke's early death "caused Fukuzawa to hold his father in his heart throughout his life as an idealized image, which became his spiritual support." This is likely an insight Shinzo could make precisely because he was in the same situation as Yukichi.

I should also add that while both Yukichi and Shinzo used the idealized image of their fathers as a moral pillar, they were free from the oppression of a father who was "an extremely fastidious person" ("The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi") or from parent-child conflict when they set out on their own paths.